


Mirror Moment

by talefeathers



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Character Study, Drabble, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Minor Character Death, Origin Story, Relationship Study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-29
Updated: 2020-04-29
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:28:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23913076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/talefeathers/pseuds/talefeathers
Summary: The night of the Graysons' murder is nothing like the night of the Waynes', and Dick is nothing like Bruce, but something links the two nights together in Jim Gordon's mind.
Relationships: Jim Gordon & Bruce Wayne, Jim Gordon & Dick Grayson
Comments: 7
Kudos: 51
Collections: Batfam/DC Universe, Tumblr Drabbles





	Mirror Moment

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: "Things you said when we first met."

It was about as different from the night Jim Gordon had picked little Bruce Wayne up off the pavement as it could be. 

The night Thomas and Martha Wayne were murdered some twenty years ago had been a relentlessly dark one in November. The freezing rain had seemed to slice right through Gordon’s uniform, straight into the skin beneath. He’d found Bruce Wayne shivering. He’d given the kid his coat.

Now it was summer, and a hot one at that. Gordon’s glasses fogged up when he stepped out of the air conditioned patrol car into the humidity outside. It was, eerily, about the same time of night as it had been when he’d found the Waynes, but longer nights meant the sun had only just gone down, and the lights of Haly’s Circus kept things as bright as if it hadn’t. It was nothing like the inky pitch of Crime Alley.

And the kid in the center ring was nothing like Bruce.

It was a difference that went deeper than class or ethnicity, though the gaps were certainly wide enough there; Bruce was the sole heir to some of Gotham’s oldest, whitest money, while this kid was Roma and had been traveling with Haly's his entire life. The primary things that separated the two of them, however, were even more fundamental than that. When Gordon had arrived at the scene of the Waynes’ double homicide, eleven-year-old Bruce had been silent. He had knelt in a pool of his parents’ blood, hardly even seeming to notice the tears that streaked down his frost-reddened cheeks. He had allowed himself to be shuffled from place to place by Gordon as if he were inanimate—a rolling suitcase that needed only to be nudged one way or the other. It had been days before anyone had been able to get a word out of him.

This kid—Grayson, Bullock had called him, Richard Grayson—was a blur of constant, frantic motion and a riot of ceaseless, anguished noise. Gordon noticed with a pang that the kid’s voice was hoarse from the screaming he’d already done.

“We haven’t been able to, um,” Officer Lovett murmured, almost apologetically. He’d been the first on the scene, as Gordon had been twenty years ago. “We haven’t been able to get him away from the bodies.”

“That’s okay, Lovett,” Gordon nodded tersely. “I’ll get him.”

Gordon took a knee next to the wiry young acrobat, who promptly flinched away from him, clutching one of his parents’ hands in each of his. He looked up into Gordon’s face with tears rolling down his chin, and before the commissioner had had a chance to say a word the boy begged him, in that raspy, broken voice of his, for things Gordon couldn’t give.

"Please don't take me away from them," he sobbed. "Please—please don't leave them here."

It was Grayson’s eyes, in that moment, that put Jim Gordon back in Crime Alley, before he even learned that Bruce Wayne was looking on from just beyond the police line.

Because Richard Grayson and Bruce Wayne had about as much in common as the sun and the moon, but the pain in their eyes was exactly, exactly the same.


End file.
